“Is the normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and dangerous glory? Those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the chemist”

Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill

“It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000

“it is the nature of man not to have a nature.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Mortimer Adler Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought (Adler does not agree with Merleau-Ponty, but thinks the idea well worth pondering)

“Whosoever is out of patience is out of possession of his mind, body and soul.”

Sir Francis Bacon, quoted in the “Federalist Patriot” No. 04-34 25 August 2004 from federalist.com

“Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that is a different matter.”

I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism

“How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that happens in life.”

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

“For they [John Smith’s audience] did believe in the spirit of the devil which, as everyone knows, is in all of us.”

Walter Lippman The Public Philosophy

“how much human nature loves the knowledge of its existence, and how it shrinks from being deceived, will be sufficiently understood from this fact, that every man prefers to grieve in a sane mind, rather than to be glad in madness.”

St. Augustine City of God